Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Thanks to jdub, my blog here is now getting love on Planet GNOME, hooray! Karl Lattimer suggested that I should do an intro post for those readers out there with whom I haven't yet managed to meet up, so here we go:

I'm David "Lefty" Schlesinger, and my day job is Director of Open Source Technologies for ACCESS Co., Ltd. ACCESS is a Japan-based mobile software company, probably the largest, and one of our key product offerings is the ACCESS Linux Platform, an operating system stack for cell phones and other mobile devices which is based on open source and free software, including many GNOME technologies such as GTK+, Gstreamer, BlueZ, D-Bus, SQLite and others.

I've been a member of the GNOME Foundation's Advisory Board for the past three years, and am a founding member of the GNOME Mobile Initiative (about which I expect you'll be hearing much more in the coming months). ACCESS has also been a Silver sponsor of GUADEC the past two years.

I'm additionally active in the LiMo Foundation, as ACCESS' represesentative to the Architectural Council and as the chair of the Open Source Committee, which will be working in a variety of areas, internally on open source "best practices" and license compliance, and externally on community engagement and relations. I expect you'll be hearing a good deal more about this in coming months as well.

Before coming to Palm in 2001, getting spun off with Palmsource in 2003, and getting acquired by ACCESS in 2005, I was at Apple for ten years (both pre- and post-Steve), and served as the manager of the Networking Technologies team there. One of the engineers I hired while I was there was Stuart Cheshire, the architect of the Bonjourzero-configuration networking scheme, a very useful open source component (licensed under Apache v2) that's seeing increasingly wide use.

I'm a big fan of horror movies, Talking Heads, photography, and attempting to learn Japanese. I travel a lot (close to 70,000 miles so far this year), and am attempting to become the guy who knows his way around the subway system of almost any major city that has a subway system.

14
comments:

Welcome! I have to say that I'm rather hopeful for ACCESS with their acquisition of PalmSource. I've been using the Garnet VM beta on my n810, and I'm overall pretty happy with it. I look forward to better integration with its host (e.g. Bluetooth, wifi) in the future.

Are there plans to make programming for ACCESS/PalmSource easier on Linux? Currently, it's a very invovled process.

@physicow, programming for the ACCESS Linux Platform is (not too surprisingly) pretty much like programming for Linux, in large measure. We don't foresee changes to "classic" Garnet programming, but we incorporate full Garnet emulation into the platform both to support legacy apps and to ease the transition for Garnet developers.

I'd strongly encourage you to sign up for the ACCESS Developers' Network to keep abreast of the latest information. We're also going to be hosting a "Developers' Day" at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on August 5th.

Well, the Developer Network is location-independent (and free of charge!), so you can certainly take advantage of that.

As far as future plans for the Nokia tablet version of Garnet VM, I really can't say much of substance. We may offer updated versions from time to time, but there's no specific roadmap I'm in a position to share.

We created this independently of Nokia, to serve as a real-world testing resource to get the highest level of compatibility for existing apps, it's not really intended to be "productized".

As far as iPhone or Android go, no plans there.

Android is "Linux" in the loosest possible sense, the only "official" programming language for the platform is the mutant "Dalvik" variant of Java, and I think I can say with some assurance that rewriting all of Garnet VM in Java (or in Objective-C, for that matter, since there's a similarly perverse situation around programming for the iPhone) is not in the cards.

Besides, if we did want to do something for the iPhone, why would we want to pay Steve thirty cents on the dollar for the privilege of doing so...?

Phones running ALP aren't (quite) on the market yet, but we expect to start seeing them before the year is out.

(I don't get to pre-announce our customers product plans or roadmaps for them, they get all sorts of unhappy when I do that. So I don't do that. As a friend of mine at Apple used to say, "A funny thing happened to be last Friday: I got paid.")

As far as OpenMoko goes, no plans, likewise for "productizing" Garnet VM on that platform. The whole software side of the project seems to be in a huge state of flux, and we've got our own projects to deal with...

I'd stick with the Nokia tablet for the moment, myself. (If you haven't upgraded to Diablo yet, I strongly encourage you to do so, lots of improvements there!)

lefty: no worries. I understand not wanting to disclose plans. I've worked in industry some. :) I was just wondering if there were any Access customers that I could know about so that I could check out their offerings (not just phones).and maybe support you guys.

Regarding Diablo: I have it. My main objection is that the browser performance seems to have regressed (and fennec is too crashy to use). Otherwise, I'm using my Palm apps on the Garnet VM on my n810 and having a dandy time. :)

FWIW, if you want detailed feedback on the Garnet Beta, drop me a line and I'll put something together for you. It looks like some things have been addressed since the previous version (e.g. installing apps is much faster now) but many things don't seem to be (bluetooth integration, mass app installation). Please let me know if there's a paying version so I can help chip in a bit.

Hello Lefty,I'm not sure this is a right place to leave you a comment like this, but I want to say thanks for sharing your beautiful photos you took in Ryogoku Kokugikan. I really enjoyed it! I remembered how I was excited at taht time.Thank you so much!

Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you where I came.2 weeks ago, you left a comment with the link to the photos on my blog. That was a post I wrote about Banzuke for Nagoya Basyo.Here it is http://havefanwithscarlet.wordpress.com/2008/06/30/sumo-banzukeranking-of-the-wrestlers-for-nagoya-tournament-is-announced/

About Me

I'm David Schlesinger (aka "Lefty"), an active and vocal member of the burgeoning mobile open source community.
I'm currently chair of the LiMo Foundation's Open Source Committee, and have previously been a member of the their Architecture Council (2006-2008), and Architectural Steering Committee (2008-2010), as well as a member of the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board (2004-2010). I'm also a founding board member of the Open Media Now! Foundation. I've presented, on various occasions, at FOSTEL, GUADEC, Open Source in Mobile, and the Linux Symposium, among a variety of other venues.
Nothwithstanding any of that, this blog represents my own opinions, not those of my employer, our customers, or anyone else. As if you couldn't tell.